Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: New Directors/New Films 2021 Selection Wood and Water
One of the highlights of this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films, Jonas Bak’s strong feature film debut Wood and Water stars his own mother, Anke. Shot on 16mm in both the director’s native Germany and Hong Kong, where Bak is currently based, Wood and Water follows Anke in the immediate days following her retirement. When she leaves her small town to visit her long-gone son in Hong Kong, Anke finds herself adjacent to the protests unfolding there. With a keen compositional eye, palpable warmth towards all the strangers she meets and the occasional musical assist from Brian Eno’s New Space Music, Wood and […]
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Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Stunning and Eerie Arctic-Shot Short, UTUQAQ
Premiering online timed to Earth Day from Field of Vision is a stunning and poetic Arctic-shot short, UTUQAQ, directed by Iva Radivojević. Acting as her own cinematographer, Radivojević counterpoints elegant and abstract patterns across sweeping planes of ice with more human-scale documentation of the work of four researchers drilling ice cores in the region’s freezing temperatures. The narration — in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) by Aviaja Lyberth — is from the point of the view of the ice itself, evoking the earth’s geological memory as it confronts efforts of the researchers working in the moment to learn about what is being lost […]
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Trailer Watch: Leos Carax’s Annette (Plus Cannes 2021 News)
The long-awaited trailer for Leos Carax’s musical Annette — his follow-up to Holy Motors, one of best films of the last decade — has just been posted online. Concurrent with a communique from French President Emmanuel Macron that seems designed to assure anxious international industry about the viability of the upcoming ’21 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where Annette will be opening night, it’s a particularly impressive publicity drop. The film’s synopsis, from the press release: Los Angeles, today. Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor who falls in love with Ann (Marion […]
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Watch: “A Message to Viewers of Radu Jude: Forget About These Films!”
In the wake of Radu Jude’s Golden Bear victory at this year’s Berlinale for his latest, the pandemic production Bad Luck Banging, or Looney Porn, streaming platform DAFilms is hosting a five-film retrospective of his work. In the above video, recorded as an introduction to the series, Jude looks up a Romanian right-wing website which condemns him at last in verse. “You, cinephile, if you care who finances films, wish him to rest in peace and forget what he’s done,” reads part of the poem he recites without a blink. Click here to learn more about the series.
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Trailer Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Aleph
A world premiere I’m highly anticipating out of the upcoming 2021 edition of New Directors/New Films is the second feature from Iva Radivojević, Aleph. From New Directors: In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends […]
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Trailer Watch: Moara Passoni’s Doc Fortnight Selection, Êxtase
Moara Passoni’s astonishing hybrid work of documentary, memoir and fiction, Êxtase, which has been making the festival rounds following a CPH:DOX premiere, arrives in the U.S. at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. The film will be viewable online from March 28 until April 2 and is a feature debut for the director, who splits her time between her native Brazil and New York. From my 25 New Face profile of Passoni last summer: The hybrid work pulls from the director’s own diaries and interviews with other anorexics to capture the lived experience of anorexia, its social underpinnings and its use as an […]
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Watch: Sean Baker’s Short Film for Khaite’s Fall ’21 Collection
Inspired, he says, by Walter Hill and, as obvious from the title treatment, The Warriors title designer Dan Perri, Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) has directed a blast of a fashion short for Khaite, a girl-gang fantasia evoking the cinema as well as streets of ’70s and ’80s New York. Shot by Sean Price Williams, the short compresses the attitude, abandon and confrontations of some imagined and long-lost work of downtown cinema (you’ll pull your own set of references — mine included Ms. 45, Liquid Sky, Paris is Burning and Wild Style) into a brisk four-minutes scored to Ace Frehley’s New […]
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“…I Asked If She Was Up for Hauling a Mattress and Screaming Bloody Murder for a Short Film…”: Adinah Dancyger On Her Hannah Gross-Starring Short, Moving
The transportation of an object from point A to point B — it’s one of the most basic of human endeavors, and one that provides both story and a bit of mystery to Adinah Dancyger’s rich and elegant short, Moving. Starring Hannah Gross (Mindhunter, I Used To Be Darker) and winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short at the Slamdance 2020 festival, Moving, with much physical action and minimal dialogue, focuses on a young woman moving a mattress across town and up a flight of stairs to an empty apartment. Moving in New York City is a nightmare […]
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Trailer Watch: Slamdance 2021 Premiere Teenage Emotions
One of the highlights of this year’s forthcoming Slamdance, Frederic Da’s feature debut Teenage Emotions was shot during lunch breaks at the high school Da works at as a film teacher. Even with production was cut short by COVID, the results are lively, extremely of-the-moment, immersive and funny. We’ll be publishing an interview with Da on Friday, but for now here’s the trailer.
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“An Ode to the Viruses of Our Day: Watch Nicholas D’Agostino’s Animated Short, Despot
Previously at Filmmaker, animator Nicholas D’Agostino wrote about masks, animation and the power of myth. Now, on the last day of the Trump presidency, he premieres a new short, Despot, that he describes as an “ode to the viruses of the day.” Watch the short above and read D’Agostino’s statement about the film below. On the eve of what many hope is a new chapter, for themselves, for their country, for the world, it feels only right to reflect on what has been wrought during these recent years. A reckoning that has culminated in the horrors of 2020. It was with a […]
